Making great pictures in the digital world involves more than snapping them with a digital camera; it involves spending time in the digital darkroom. Actually, the digital darkroom is a misnomer because, unlike the old chemical darkroom days where we sequestered ourselves in light-tight rooms, the digital darkroom really isn’t dark at all. The digital darkroom is a program like Adobe PhotoShop CS4, PhotoShop Element 7, or some other photo-editing programs. Manipulating a photo in the digital darkroom is an art form just as burning and dodging was in the old chemical-darkroom days was. Every professional photographer has to master Adobe PhotoShop CS4 as well as other professional photo manipulating programs. Many amateur photographers invest in these programs too, but never have a need for many of the features these programs have to offer. PhotoShop CS4 can cost you $600 or more. Why pay hundreds of dollars for professional features that you may never use, when you can start out with a freeware program that rivals PhotoShop CS4 as a full-featured photo editor. That freeware program is GIMP.
I heard a great deal about GIMP from people online. It has several good reviews in online newsletters that I receive regularly, newsletters I know to be purveyors of accurate, trustworthy information. I run PhotoShop Element 6.0 and am well satisfied with it, but I decided to down load GIMP and test-drive it to see if it would be useful to my readers. The end result is that I strongly recommend that anyone wanting to try their hand at the digital darkroom without committing large sums of money to it, should download this freeware program. Here’s the download link http://download.cnet.com/GIMP/3000-2192_4-10073935.html. This is the CNET download site for those with a Windows OS, but other sites are available for those with Linux and MAC OS.
GIMP is a full-featured, multi-platform, editing program that will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux machines. Unlike many of the more limited-featured freeware editing programs, GIMP, like PhotoShop CS4, has a menu system that really isn’t intuitive. Like PhotoShop CS4, GIMP has a relatively steep learning curve. On the other hand, many of the menus and dialog boxes are laid out identical to those in PhotoShop which makes using GIMP great basic training for moving up to PhotoShop later on if you find out that you do really need the additional features that PhotoShop CS4 has to offer.
I’ve actually loaded this program on my granddaughter’s computer, and I’m teaching her the many joys of the digital darkroom using it. We don’t see each other as often as I would like, so I create tutorials for her and email them to her as .pdf files. We do talk on the telephone everyday and it was during one of those conversations that she suggested that I share those tutorials with you here on Factoidz.
The best way to master any new software program is to have it on your computer so you can have it open and running as you study a tutorial. The first things that I taught my granddaughter were how to open a picture file in GIMP and perform a few simple editing tasks like cropping, red eye removal, color correction, etc. I want to keep these tutorials in bite size pieces for you so you can learn one or two new things with each new part in the Digital Darkroom series. In part 2 of this series I will show you how to open a photo file in GIMP, use the “Red Eye” removal tools, crop it while maintaining proper photo proportions for printing, and then save it as a new file.
For those of you who haven’t had much experience downloading and installing programs from the internet, let me assure you that you can safely download and install this program from the CNET site that I gave you. CNET is a safe, malware-free site to download from. Still, the safest procedure to follow when downloading any program from the Internet is to save it to a file and then scan it with your antivirus program before installing it. Once you have saved it to files, scanned it for malware, left click on the file, and follow the onscreen prompts to install it.
